Today, QPilot.cloud, a company that brings the scheduled economy to physical goods, announces their official launch and new vision for how both B2B and B2C marketers can enjoy the benefits of “scheduled comerce” without competing with a massive marketplace.
“Amazon.” Answers QPilot.cloud founder David Bradley, when asked about the inspiration for creating a fresh approach to scheduled orders and deliveries.
“They’ve got Dash replenishment for automated fulfillment, “ he continues. “For B2C, they have Subscribe and Save.”
“They can’t be the only ecommerce nerds studying hard in the field of scheduled order data. It’s a data goldmine that ultimately closes the loop on fully automated purchasing and fulfillment.”
“The technology to power advanced purchasing and scheduling automation is here and QPilot delivers it by unifying services like product feeds and CRM’s on a rolling timeline. It’s complex stuff that we make easy to integrate with and accessible via our API, and with the rise of user experiences on chatbots, connected IoT and websites, we can distill the technical complexities into very simple human experiences.”
How is QPilot different than subscription software?
It is QPilot’s integration-first approach and API that enables transactions to be scheduled for the future, having been initially “Queued up” by human users (shoppers), Bots and connected IoT that unlocks new possibilities for automating recurring purchases.
“While we do address today’s subscription commerce needs,” says Bradley, “we’re excited to be working more with bots and IoT as they take on more roles in assisting with what’s best for the consumer. These connected digital brains are the ultimate purchasing and scheduling managers. They can constantly analyze a rolling calendar of events & scheduled transactions to focus on optimizing which goods should be fulfilled or replenished and when the purchaser expects them to arrive.
“Best of all, we humans can interrupt them whenever we want and these bots won’t even flinch.”
What Bradley is describing is how automation is comfortably implemented right now in B2B and B2C eCommerce and Customer Service: a user managed approach to automation where bots assist humans and humans exert control as needed; incrementally relying more on automation over time.
“With QPilot, at any point in time, a human admin can change an expectation and manage scheduled orders via the experience layer. Today this is usually done on a website that the customer logs into, but we’re very excited to see our API powering conversational experiences on SMS, Slack, and Live Chat.
“It’s like asking a purchasing manager to order more coffee pods for the team next week and then having them respond with an adjusted order and then optimizing the next year of re-orders because of a recent change in coffee consumption.”
